After what he did to the 2000 electionsWhich was what, exactly? Run?
The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senateposted by scalefree at 3:57 PM on October 31, 2007
The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;
The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as the President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.
The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
Dennis Kavanagh, a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, noticed recently that expressive voting is becoming more popular in his country. "Social class, left-right ideology and party loyalty are declining as cues for deciding how to vote," he wrote. Instead, voters are asking themselves, "How do I feel about myself voting for this party?"Reggie Digest: HEY EVERYONE, THE POST IS ABOUT THE 2004 ELECTION AND HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH AL GORE.
Expressive voting, he observes, is "a form of self-characterization." The results of your vote are less important than the sort of person you become by voting. For those Ralph Nader voters, the important thing is to be the sort of people who vote for Ralph Nader.
The Republican effort to make the Bush tax cuts permanent generates strongly held feelings from the Base, more so than for any other domestic initiative tested in the survey. Proposals to erase the Bush tax cuts generate considerable anger from the Base. The two issues together cover 69% of the Base with extremely strong feelings about at least one of them. ...As a (Canadian) centrist, I think the Republican base is -- how do I put this? -- completely detached from reality. The sooner they're separated from power, the better.
Framing Democrat health care proposals as “placing a government bureaucrat between patients and doctors” or as “creating big government-run health care” can be very effective in mobilizing the Republican Base, especially in tandem with the motivating messages on health care reform. Two-thirds of the Base has extremely strong feelings about one or both of these ways of describing the Democrat approach to health care. ...
Democrat Position on Medicare Prescription Drug Program. The Republican Base separates this issue from the other health care issues and singles it out with a significant level of disapproval. This is especially the case for seniors in our Base. A 55% majority of our seniors have extremely strong feelings about “Democrats who want to take the Medicare prescription drug benefit away from seniors.” Seventy-two percent (72%) of the Republican seniors express varying degrees of anger with this Democrat position.
There is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does. Whenever we act with reference to our fellow men, we must sin, and we must still sin when we refuse to act; for the refusal to be involved in the evil of action carries with it the breach of the obligation to do one's duty....posted by russilwvong at 7:15 PM on October 31, 2007 [1 favorite]
By avoiding a political action because it is unjust, the perfectionist does nothing but exchange blindly one injustice for another which might even be worse than the former. He shrinks from the lesser evil because he does not want to do evil at all. Yet his personal abstention from evil, which is actually a subtle form of egotism with a good conscience, does not at all affect the existence of evil in the world but only destroys the faculty of discriminating between different evils.
Nader is the one honest player in that whole mess and people still think he didn't have the right to run."The central element of Ralph Nader's public appeal is, and has always been, honesty":
So far the Democratic saviors in congress have shown a pretty impressive unwillingness to check this conduct. The leading Democratic candidates also show an unwillingness to withdraw from Iraq. Why is that?
Seriously, no one is saying you're obligated to vote Democrat...Don't vote for someone you hate. Lieberman's a warmonger and might as well change his last name to the letter R. And before you say how Lieberman was on the ticket in 2000, I'd like to calmly ask you to read this insightful comment by jonp72. Hell, I'll just reproduce it for you here. For convenience.
You're forgetting that we didn't have the precedent of Dick Cheney as an all-powerful Veep in 2000. I would have rather had Lieberman going to the funerals of foreign dignitaries (which is what most Veeps did before Cheney) than as a United States Senator. Besides, if Gore had won in 2000, he could have dumped Lieberman in 2004, much like FDR dumped Henry Wallace before settling on Harry Truman.If you think the Dems' policies are all wrong and the Greens' are all right, then vote Green. Your vote is still wasted, but in the benign it's-all-part-of-the-process way that my Kerry vote was wasted in 2004. But if you think (absent any third option) that Democrats are preferable to Republicans then your current voting habits are counterproductive to your beliefs. The entirety of your beliefs... not just the demagoguery of your beef with the two-party system.
Realism, then, considers prudence--the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions--to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences. Classical and medieval philosophy knew this, and so did Lincoln when he said: "I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."Morgenthau also discusses at length why motives aren't so important:
To search for the clue to foreign policy exclusively in the motives of statesmen is both futile and deceptive. It is futile because motives are the most illusive of psychological data, distorted as they are, frequently beyond recognition, by the interests and emotions of actor and observer alike. Do we really know what our own motives are? And what do we know of the motives of others?If actions and consequences are so important, how are you supposed to assess them, given that you can't predict the future? You can still identify a plausible range of outcomes, and figure out what the worst-case scenario is. Eric Bergerud:
Yet even if we had access to the real motives of statesmen, that knowledge would help us little in understanding foreign policies, and might well lead us astray. It is true that the knowledge of the statesman's motives may give us one among many clues as to what the direction of his foreign policy might be. It cannot give us, however, the one clue by which to predict his foreign policies. History shows no exact and necessary correlation between the quality of motives and the quality of foreign policy. This is true in both moral and political terms.
We cannot conclude from the good intentions of a statesman that his foreign policies will be either morally praiseworthy or politically successful. Judging his motives, we can say that he will not intentionally pursue policies that are morally wrong, but we can say nothing about the probability of their success. If we want to know the moral and political qualities of his actions, we must know them, not his motives. How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?
Neville Chamberlain's politics of appeasement were, as far as we can judge, inspired by good motives; he was probably less motivated by considerations of personal power than were many other British prime ministers, and he sought to preserve peace and to assure the happiness of all concerned. Yet his policies helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions of men. Sir Winston Churchill's motives, on the other hand, were much less universal in scope and much more narrowly directed toward personal and national power, yet the foreign policies that sprang from these inferior motives were certainly superior in moral and political quality to those pursued by his predecessor. Judged by his motives, Robespierre was one of the most virtuous men who ever lived. Yet it was the utopian radicalism of that very virtue that made him kill those less virtuous than himself, brought him to the scaffold, and destroyed the revolution of which he was a leader.
Good motives give assurance against deliberately bad policies; they do not guarantee the moral goodness and political success of the policies they inspire. What is important to know, if one wants to understand foreign policy, is not primarily the motives of a statesman, but his intellectual ability to comprehend the essentials of foreign policy, as well as his political ability to translate what he has comprehended into successful political action. It follows that while ethics in the abstract judges the moral qualities of motives, political theory must judge the political qualities of intellect, will, and action.
Bismarck in particular never thought that events could be predicted with precision. When a policy was pursued a range of outcomes could be expected. The trick was to develop policy where the minimum outcome (today we might call it a worst case scenario) was acceptable. If a triumph ensued great. If it was something in between, don't die of surprise.posted by russilwvong at 9:34 PM on November 1, 2007
The club of "but they're the only alternative" is true in a sense.Um, in the sense that in a first-past-the-post system, it's definitionally true?
And now, when a lawsuit is filed accusing the Democratic Party ... it doesn't matter whether the Democratic Party is a criminal organization with no ethical rudder, because Bush is bad, Nader is stupid, and Democrats should be in office no matter what Democrats believe or do.I think you may be projecting past the Nader bit, which seems somewhat germane, since he's the one filing the lawsuit.
Americans think that theFixed.Democrats[Green Party / Ralph Nader / liberal strawmen] tell them that America is irresponsible, disgusting, and immoral, that Americans are destroying the world militarily, economically, and environmentally, that rich people with Hybrid cars are ethically and morally superior to people who drive 10-year-old used cars they can afford, and that the way to fix our problems is not to focus on economic recovery, sound fiscal policy, getting out of Iraq, improving national security, stopping torturing people, or anything else that might actually help, but instead focusing on issues that will never go anywhere, such as abortion. That message resonates with some people, but apparently offends more people than Bush's horrible policies and corruption. And to make matters worse,Democrats[Nader] and, moreso,their[his] supporters come off as being such smug, self-righteous, jerks that millions of otherwise rational, intelligent people just want to stick it to them by voting for anyone but the people who are running on a platform of "if you don't vote for me, you're an idiot, idiot."
Here is a guy actually working to change the system, and people piss all over him and call him a traitor.Why do otherwise rational people like you give Ralph Nader this eternal free pass for being a shithead because General Motors got pissed at him 40 years ago? He said that Jimmy Carter had been "corporatized" and has been accelerating into wackjob territory ever since. What is the deal here?
You have serious 3rd party candidates addressing issues you want taken care of, looking to change the form of elections, amending the rules, and the stranglehold monopoly on the media for any kind of political debate and you’re more than willing to not only fuck those people over in favor of some rich assheads who have repeatedly proven themselves willing to turn their backs on you, but even if they go and do something on their own, you run them down as scum and lock step in march with your betters......And the way you achieve this is by splitting their party...
In this election I favor Ron Paul. His chances are slight. Everyone who backs him knows it. And still, we expect him to go the distance and play to win, to campaign for president.Last I checked, Ron Paul was running as a Republican.
I think what gets people's goat is that they expect others to do their will. And that's what makes some of us throw around the word 'entitled'. Nader doesn't owe 'humanity' or 'the Left' noninterference in presidential elections. By the way, these sorts of arguments don't do Democrats any good. It makes them look dismissive of choice.Personally, what gets my goat is that he's a hypocrite and a scumbag, but it doesn't help that he's filing a lawsuit on behalf of "third parties" when he doesn't and didn't represent a third party.
Nader going for it to the end isn't evidence of malice on his part.Running on a separate ticket in 2004 is evidence of malice towards the Green Party. Concentrating the campaign on swing states rather than the blue states (if 5% is really the metric) is evidence of placing self-interest and anti-Democrat policies over the interests of the Green Party.
That said, I do agree it was plausible to consider that his campaign would be of benefit to Bush.Indeed, Ralph Nader himself has admitted that on multiple occasions, both with regard to the 2000 and 2004 elections, before and after. He stated his preference for Bush over Gore. He expressed no contrition or concern about the fact that his campaign was backed by Republican donations.
Blumenthal: Do you still see no difference between the republicans and democrats after seven years of George W. Bush?posted by finite at 10:04 PM on November 2, 2007
Nader: I never said there was no difference. I said the similarities between the two parties tower over the dwindling real differences. And, when you talk about differences, it isn't just differences in agendas. For example, the republicans went into Iraq, I don't think the democrats would have. Clinton was bombing, many times, Iraq, but I don't think he would have been stupid enough to invade it. But, so you can say, there is a difference between republicans and democrats. But, did the democrats stop Bush, as they could have in the Congress, from invading Iraq? No. Many of them voted for that war resolution.
Blumenthal: So, if Al Gore was president now, you think everything would be the same, and we'd be in the same position we are now with the environment, the war, the economy, international relations?
Nader: Given his record as Vice President, yes, it wouldn't be that much different, except for the war. [...]
Back in 2000, nobody could have predicted 9/11
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posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:12 PM on October 31, 2007